Hi Mike,
First I'll talk about speakers. I had Tannoy Canterbury SEs and had very similar experience to you: not convincing unless they were pumped up, and somewhat honky. Also, and probably distinct to yours, they were a complete bugger to drive needing an amp with mid damping factor and reasonable current drive, the best being a Tresham SR402 Mosfet (so good Tannoy bought the company!), or a Radford sta 100.
I progressed from these to some JBL S2 9800SEs. Much better all round (and should be with a list price of £35k!) but really had to be too far out in my room to sound their best.
I tried Klipsch Fortes, which sounded great in my room, with arguably more bass than the Cornwalls, but bought the Cornwalls, as it's hard to move away from 15ins drivers once bitten, and they provided that mid band richness.
The Cornwalls work superbly in my room, outperforming the Canterburys and JBLs with ease on every metric. My room has a bass suck out, so with all these speakers bass is tuneful but not as strong as in my studio, which has much better acoustics.The Cornwalls are also used for my home cinema set up and again perform wonderfully stereo only. Once I was convinced by the speakers I upgraded the crossovers with V Cap ODAMs (bypassed with Teflons) and Path resistors and that took them to another level. These are definitely end game.
Amplifiers
I currently drive the Cornwalls with some upgraded Mastersound 845 monoblocks and my own brand DAC/streamer and preamp to get these superb results. I also have Radford sta 15 and 25, Arcam A60 and the aforementioned Tresham. The speakers work very well with all of these, but best with the Mastersounds, a Cayin 845a I have, or either of the Radfords. They sound very good with the Tresham 200 watts a channel into 8 ohms (warm MOSFET) and pretty decent with the A60 but as Tony says come to life with the valve amps-SE or push pull. I did own a pair of Silvercore monoblocks but didn't try with the Klipschs. Whilst beautifully built and a great party piece, the sound was disappointing with the JBLs vis a vis the Mastersounds. I had previously heard 833 amps with serious levels of HT and these had sounded much better, while the Silvercores run their 833s very coolly.
So, I agree with Tony's advice to try some valve amps. If you can get your hands on a Radford sta 15 or 25 or a Dynaco, great! if not, Cayin make a range of very well built valve amps from EL34, KT88 and the 845a I have which all sound very good, have low maintenance and are freely available in Canada. It's not something you'll sort with interconnects or changing valves in a pre.
Hope that's helpful
David
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